Mission: Impossible — Final Reckoning feels like a conclusion to 30 years worth of proving that yes, you still can conjure up a certain vintage strain of Hollywood magic. It also feels like the end of an era.

The Equalizer 2 feels uneven and off balance. But not Washington. Despite his trashy trappings, there’s no one cooler to watch in action.

The Little Things settles sleekly into its place as a movie of the week. That’s a satisfying enough ambition — even as the actors onscreen give performances that point to a richer, wilder movie.

The movie’s ambitions exceed its grasp, and it’s hard not to wonder if the ideas here might not have been better served in a shorter, tighter format.

Everything goes to hell in a decorative handbasket. What starts out as a simple plan will be destined to become, well, "A Simple Plan" redux.

Like the apex predators slithering at the center of it all, it gets the job done once it lets is more brutal, primal instincts take over. Bon Appétit.

Part II feels like just another case of sequel-itis, something designed to metastasize into just another franchise among many. Just get through this, it says, and then tune in next year, next summer, next financial quarter statement or board-meeting announcement, for the real story.

There’s undoubtedly better adventures on the way for the Four in future endeavors, and this should truly be viewed as a first step to making them a major deal in the MCU. But to say their introduction is fantastic would be pushing it.

This is not a reinvention of the wheel, just a rotation of the tires. For a story that started with a young man trying to follow in huge footsteps while blazing his own path, it might be unfair to play the compare game here. Yet Creed II does not give us anything but another, slightly superior Rocky sequel. It wins on points. Just don’t expect a knockout.

Big, loud and lurid, but no less entertaining for that.

What these guys do for revenge during one hellish day in the Big Apple makes the panic room look like Barney's toy box. The film itself goes off the deep end way before the end credits.

Brought to the screen awkwardly but ardently by Mamet-actor supreme Joe Mantegna in his feature-directing debut.

It’s a good-looking, well-acted movie with a solid kicker. As for the odyssey of emotional nuance that its style and portent seem to promise, it digs beneath the surface, but to a shallower depth than it seems to think.

Trap is… well, you wouldn’t say it’s good...It is undeniably camp, however, and we look forward to attending one of those midnight reclamation-revival screenings à la Showgirls, where everyone screams the dialogue and dresses like Hartnett’s normcore Norman Bates, a decade from now.

There’s a words-escape-me, tingling, offbeat something about this movie that reels you in — a something dimmed, maybe, by the brunt of the film so clearly guiding us toward this impression. Once it gets there, it doesn’t quite know where to go. Wit gives way to enervation.

The whole thing takes on a level of fractured fairy-tale storytelling that nods to both the Brothers Grimm and the father-figure Cronenberg.

The plot doesn’t make much sense, but the film is filled with lovely little moments courtesy of Bridges, who brings a casualness to this character that feels right.

With the Bard’s words, Henry roused his soldiers to action: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” With this mediocrity, it’s more a case of how the war was wan.

Director Brian Robbins ("Good Burger") and screenwriter W. Peter Iliff ("Prayer of the Rollerboys") have wrapped their moral fable in a glossy package of hard football action and towel-slapping, hard-body fun that might seem exciting if you've never seen a movie before.

The actors try their best, but Östlund’s insistent conceptual droning overtakes them.

The movie starts off as yet another Kill Bill, et al. clone. Thanks to its star, it at least goes out as something closer to Kill, Bill, Kill!

Veering on the maudlin, the film ultimately succeeds by striking a universal chord on the subject of inconsolable loss. It's a stirring, humane testament from a surprising source.

Compared with ("The Sixth Sense"), there's no contest. Stir of Echoes has been outrun and outclassed.

You could, however, accuse this Black Christmas of elevating the subtext of decades’ worth of slasher flicks to the point that the text itself starts to take a backseat, or that its third-act reveal may be trying a tad too hard to grab the social-thriller brass ring. You would not necessarily be wrong.

The Dry is solid and appreciably sad but, for all the virtues of its rough symbolism and intriguing backstory, almost too jampacked with discovery for its own good.

At its best, The Predator is a movie that makes you forget there’s an iconic killer alien involved at all — with the exception of a slaughter in a lab and a shoot-out near a spaceship, the high points mostly involve the cast simply cracking wise with each other.

The Hunt is neither a harbinger of Western civilization’s end nor quite the Swiftian satire its creators want it to be. It’s simply a better-than-decent B-movie, the kind that takes pride in its sick kills and throws a lot of punches that only occasionally connect.

There’s such beautiful artisanal touches that Russo-Young adds to what could have been a standard YA-lit flick and so much that the actors do with scenes of people just talking that you can’t write it off. And there are too many dramatic moments that flatline when they should spike, too many plot turns that feel false and too much reliance on “coincidence” as some higher-power string-yanking to say it completely works.